Saturday, May 05, 2018

Are delicious right now in the Northern hemisphere. My yard is completely natural, with no memory of pesticides (a wild jungle!), so I gather the leaves of baby dandelions, clean them and eat them. The smallest make a nice salad, with a refreshing tang. The slightly larger ones I parboil and then fry with garlic and olive oil.

Your mileage might differ.

The roots of dandelions can be roasted to make a coffee substitute if you are that way inclined. The yellow flowers themselves can be picked, with the stems attached, and then woven into a crown or a necklace. The white seed-heads are among the most beautiful shapes in nature.

Did that make you feel better about the incredible virility of dandelions and their ability to overtake any bare patch of soil they see, including your flower and vegetable beds?

Here's an old embroidery of mine. The flowers are not dandelions but you can pretend they are, so that the next time you walk outside you will feel yourselves observed.

Monday, April 30, 2018

Remember the economist Robin Hanson and his proposal that being raped is less harmful than being cuckolded, provided that the rape victim is first drugged and then will never know about rape? (1)

Hanson has now proposed a new and fascinating solution to the blue balls (2) of online incels, the "involuntarily celibate" men who gather together on sites where the sufferers not only comfort each other but also recommend revenge at the world in the form of mass violence and rapes, and who call women subhuman. That new solution is the redistribution of sex!:

One might plausibly argue that those with much less access to sex suffer to a similar degree as those with low income, and might similarly hope to gain from organizing around this identity, to lobby for redistribution along this axis and to at least implicitly threaten violence if their demands are not met. As with income inequality, most folks concerned about sex inequality might explicitly reject violence as a method, at least for now, and yet still be encouraged privately when the possibility of violence helps move others to support their policies.

(Sex could be directly redistributed, or cash might be redistributed in compensation.)

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